3. Mean people get that way somehow. A lot of the stories in these anthologies were pretty simple morality tales and revenge fantasies – terrible people getting punished for their crimes in ironic and horrible ways – and that came with its own satisfaction. I didn’t necessarily conclude that Brent would one day be bullied by a bigger (or undead, or alien) bully, but I admit it was vindicating to see that the adults responsible for these stories agreed that there would be some justice in it if he were. What was more challenging, but probably healthier for me, was the vast number of stories in which the horror was seated in what was done to create the monster. The bigotry of the extended community in “My Monster... My Dad” (Jan Strnad and Martin Salvador, Creepy #76) turns the child of a loving, warmly portrayed interracial couple into a little psycho who murders his stepfather. Another that had a big effect on me was “Brain Food” (Maxene Fabe and Fred Carillo, House of Mystery #215), in which a boy teased by classmates for struggling in school takes, in essence, a smart drug which in turn makes him the addicted agent of aliens intent on eating his peers.
The empathy lesson was stark and unavoidable to me: Kids like Brent got that way somehow, and might themselves need pity and help. I wish I could say that absorbing this notion helped me work some kind of empathy-magic reversal in Brent’s life, but I can’t; he was persistent at making himself unapproachable. But I did stop hating him, and I tried to be nice, and if it didn’t change who he was, it at least changed who I would be the next time I met someone like him.
4. The page is there for anyone to turn it. The choice to turn the page is yours, no matter who you are. The structure of a comic, any comic, teaches the reader the importance of one’s own agency and engagement, but I place my learning it squarely at the feet of Vampirella. There she was, all adult and sexy in a Playboy-bunny-like costume that had been co-designed by a woman (Trina Robbins, as I’d learned from the letter-column in #13), asking me to read her stories. Her tone was like my big sister’s on the days when she felt more protective than annoyed toward me, welcoming and warm.
Unlike the host characters in the other comics, she was also the lead in her own serial narrative, which ran alongside the other one-shot stories she introduced; fighting monsters wherever she met them, Vampi struggled to maintain her sunny disposition and integrity despite being hunted by the father of her true love, Adam Van Helsing. That the art was often sexually exploitative didn’t register with me at the time; what did stay with me was her strength, her determination to do good in the world, her confidence that her actions mattered, her agency. She gave me what Sarah Connor would offer a decade later in the Terminator films and what Buffy Summers would offer another decade after that: a role model that placed all the traditional heroic traits in a woman’s body with little in the way of apology or compromise.
One of fiction’s services to the young, I’m convinced, is to resist the Brent Kings of the world for us and with us. Engaged by a story, we get to reclaim and revive our moxie, not only by identifying with characters who call tyranny by its name and model a range of ways to defy intimidation, but also, in the case of suspense and horror, by practicing against the stories themselves. Where meeting a bully’s dare in real life usually produces little more than a hollow feeling of temporary respite, meeting a story’s dare – moving past a cringe or a quickened pulse to get to the end – can bring catharsis, laughter, pity, enlightenment, a sense of validation, any number of emotional and intellectual satisfactions. A good scary story offers us something useful in return for engaging, rewards us for pushing past fear, helps us to recognize the external dare for the empty-handed long con that it is, teaches us to turn the page with confidence.
[22] Brent King is a pseudonym very far afield from the real name of anyone I knew or know.
Confessions of a (Former) Unicorn
Tara O’Shea is a Chicago-area writer and web developer. In addition to co-editing the Hugo-Award winning anthology Chicks Dig Time Lords (with Lynne M. Thomas), she also designs and maintains websites for authors such as Seanan McGuire, Claudia Gray, RJ Anderson, and Paul Cornell. As a journalist, her articles, reviews, interviews, and essays have appeared in such publications as Tor.com, Firefox News, Titan’s officially licensed Angel magazine, Yahoo! Internet Life, The 11th Hour, Audio Revolution, MediaSharx/ZENtertainment, and other online and print publications. For more information about the author, please visit her website at fringe-element.net.
Comics For Heroes was a classic hole-in-the-wall comics shop. It was tiny, with a table of back-issue boxes that took up 80% of the main room. It smelled sweetly of old paper, a smell that gets under your skin and makes me think of childhood. The walls were lined with displays and, up high where kids couldn’t potentially break them, action figures, toys, art books, statues, and T-shirts. The front door and windows were covered by posters and standees, faded to black and white by the sun. My mother was convinced it was an opium den, and insisted on accompanying me the first time I went, to ensure that I would emerge from this cave of wonders alive and (mostly) sane.
What made Comics For Heroes so special was its owner – Linda Schein.
Linda was younger than my mom, with black hair and a gold-capped tooth. She was a full-blooded Native American from the Choctaw Nation, and had served in the Marines as a radio operator. What I remembered most was that she always wore a faded blue Chicago Tribune apron, the pockets of which held all her cash to make change. There was no cash register; Linda would write down what you bought on a pad of paper in pencil or pen, and give you free handouts of DC Direct and other promotions with your books.
It took me almost a year before I figured out new comics arrived on Wednesdays, and specific titles shipped on certain weeks. Linda would let me hang out and talk for hours at the shop, paging through Previews to see what was coming, and she would special order anything in its pages and allow patrons to pay in installments over time. I still remember buying a George Perez Wonder Woman T-shirt, $3 at a time, until I’d finally paid it off. I wore it until it was faded and stained and no longer fit, and didn’t care if my classmates teased me.
You might think that being a comics geek would mean I was “just one of the guys.” But boys my own age weren’t looking for girls to pal around with and talk capes. They wanted girls in Laura Ashley dresses with Swatch watches with whom they could go to school dances. Not weirdos who sat beneath the metal fire escape stairs reading The Flash and New Teen Titans.
I didn’t care. When I looked at the DC Comics masthead, I saw Publisher Jenette Kahn, Editor Karen Berger, artists Jill Thompson and Colleen Doran, and writers Mindy Newman, Kim Yale, and Barbara Randall. I saw women working in comics and knew that I could grow up to be like them. It was an amazing feeling. I could be exactly who I was, yet stand up and be proud. I could be a fan of Batman, because Jenette Kahn read Batman. She was my hero and my inspiration, as each month I read her Publishorial columns printed on the inside front cover of every Deluxe Format title. There she talked about everything from her childhood love of Batman to the day-to-day operations of publishing comics. She provided a peek into the mysterious world of how comics were made, and while it didn’t answer all my questions, it did give me a foothold on understanding not just the stories I was reading, but the industry that generated them.
When I was 15, Linda let me work part time in the store, pulling back issues to prep for Chicago Comic-Con, which was held every July 4th weekend. I had heard about it, but never gone, and dreamt one day of actually going and meeting the writers, artists, and editors who fed my imagination monthly with their stories.
I used to show up for work early, sitting on the metal stoop in the broiling summer sun in jeans and a button-down oxford cloth shirt, waiting for Linda or her daughters Nibe and Angie to arrive and unlock the shop. Once inside, I’d be handed a list of title names and issue numbers, and spend a few hours combing through the books on metal shelves in the back room, checking them off as I found them and put the bagged, boarded,
and priced comics into the back issues boxes out front.
Linda let me read whatever I wanted, and I sampled everything from Uncanny X-Men to Captain Carrot and Howard the Duck. I sneaked peeks at the forbidden “adult” comics like Omaha the Cat Dancer, and Milo Manera art books. Looking back, it would probably horrify collectors to know a grubby, sweaty girl had read the back issues they bagged and boarded and sealed in a vault, with dreams of going to college on the secondary-market sales of a title that would – in about a year – end up in quarter bins.
What was amazing about that summer wasn’t just that I had my dream job. It was seeing with my own eyes the world of other comics readers from the opposite side of the counter.
There were kids and adults, men and boys. A few fellow female unicorns. Casual readers and folks who made the weekly Wednesday afternoon trek like me. I still remember the businessman in his thirties who wore a shiny gold Batman tie-clip. It opened up a door in my head with an idea. Anyone could read comics, and everyone did.
No-one who came into the store thought it was odd that it was run by a woman and her daughters. People came to Comics For Heroes – instead of going to the relatively new, flashy, brightly-lit stores modeled after record shops like Gary Colabuono’s Moondog’s Comicland – because of Linda. Because of the family atmosphere of the store. Girls and women in particular came to the store as an alternative to Larry Charet’s Larry’s Comic Book Store on Devon Avenue, precisely because it was run by women. If you ever wondered about the existence of Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons, wonder no more. Those shops definitely did exist. But Comics For Heroes was never one of them. At Linda’s, no judgments would be made the second someone with two X chromosomes stepped beyond the threshold.
Linda knew all of her regulars – by face, if not by name. She always had a smile for everyone, and would take the time to point out what books were hot, look up prices for back issues in the Bible-like fine print of the Overstreet’s Comic Book Price Guide, and chat with people.
Every penny I made went right back into the store. The truth was, I’d have worked there for free.
But I didn’t work at Comics For Heroes again after that first blissful summer in the late 1980s. Life got in the way, and after I graduated high school, I went away to Spain for a year when my father got a job there. I bemoaned the fact that I couldn’t get my monthly fix overseas, and so Linda had a pull-box for me back home. I came back in November 1991 to buy its contents, catch up, and pick up a few more items to sustain me over the following six comicless months in Madrid.
When I came back from Spain, in July 1992, the first thing I did was make that familiar trek to the store. I had money in my pocket, stories to share, and when I arrived, Nibe and Angie were there, but no Linda. I hugged them, and asked where their mother was.
Nibe solemnly told me she had passed away two weeks earlier, having been in a coma following a car accident. She was only 44 years old.
I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I stumbled out of the store with a few comics in a bag and walked home in shock. I was only 18 years old, and I had never lost a friend before. I didn’t know how to process it. I felt so horrible for her children, and was angry with myself for my initial reaction, because their having to constantly deliver the news to every new patron who walked in expecting to see a familiar smile and dark head behind the counter must have been a special kind of torture.
The store remained open for a few more years, but it wasn’t the same without Linda. Her sister-in-law helped run it, but the clientele who had come there for years had come specifically for Linda. That, combined with the bubble of the speculator market bursting in the mid-1990s, made the store’s close another example of the failing direct sales market. [23]
Two days after I came home from Spain and found out Linda was gone, I finally went to my very first Chicago Comic-Con at the Ramada O’Hare.
# # #
For most people, San Diego Comic-Con is their Mecca, their geek prom, the highlight of their year. But as a kid, the idea of flying out of state for a convention was tantamount to hopping on the space shuttle for a quick trip to the moon. I set my sights on an attainable goal: the second-largest comics show in America, which happened to be in my own backyard.
There I was, an 18-year-old geek girl in a tank top, jeans, and flannel shirt, wandering the labyrinthine halls of the Ramada O’Hare, the last year the Chicago Comic-Con was held there before it moved to the Rosemont Convention Center.
It was a strange first convention. Image Comics had launched, and rather than having their panels and signings in the meeting rooms, they had erected giant circus tents outside in the parking lot. It felt like at least half – if not more – of the attendees had forsaken the con itself to stand in mile-long queues for Erik Larsen and Todd McFarlane’s signatures. It certainly seemed that way, as Peter David actually purchased pizza for those brave souls who attended his panel, as a thank you for actually showing up. That pizza, along with chocolate from one of the colorist’s tables in an Artists’ Alley that stretched along the winding corridors of the crumbling hotel, was the only food I ate that Saturday.
I wandered the con, spending a lot of time down in “Underground Hell” where the indie publishers had set up, getting anyone and everyone to gleefully deface the “I’m an Image Comics Fan” cardboard fans that we’d been given along with our programs and swag-bags.
I still have those two fans, decorated with sketches by Ben Edlund of The Tick, Mike O’Barr who created The Crow, and Girl Genius’s Phil Foglio. One unsigned message reads, “We have the freedom to do anything we want and raise the standards of comic book art – we just chose to copy Marvel,” and that summed up how I felt about Image, despite the fact that they outsold DC Comics that year while having only six titles, which published (on average) one issue each.
I went to the obligatory “Women in Comics” panel and was surprised to see a token male writer sitting next to the female panelists. His name was Gregory Wright and he was writing Silver Sable for Marvel. After the panel, he stopped me in the hallway to ask me in all sincerity what comics girls read, because he thought they were only interested in comics about Barbie.
“Dude,” I replied, “I read Batman, Suicide Squad, and Lobo.”
It was that moment when I realized something I had been in denial about my entire life: As a female reader of mainstream superhero comics, I was a unicorn. There were perhaps 20,000 attendees at that show, and you could probably count the women who weren’t “booth babes” or comics professionals on one hand.
It was a wake-up call.
Here was a professional comics writer at the most popular comics company in the world, looking to me to speak for my entire gender. So I did. We talked about how some girls only read indie books like Peter Bagge’s Hate and Daniel Clowes’s Eightball. Others were given issues of Sandman or Swamp Thing by their boyfriends, and would be part of the target audience for DC’s Vertigo imprint which would launch the following year. We talked about the appeal of story and characters over the name of the artist on the book, and how “Bad Girl” art – where the characters were posing like Playboy centerfolds – was a turn-off. But mostly, we just talked about comics.
To Wright, and probably to most of the men in that building, I was a mythical creature so rare he had never even met one before. Someone who could discuss the history of Batman with as much seriousness and geek cred as any guy, who happened to have breasts.
Interestingly, I found out almost two decades later that Wright had taken what I’d said back to Marvel, letting them know that what female readers wanted was more intellectually challenging material and less cheesecake. According to Wright, they thought he was crazy.
Every summer that I lived in Chicago, I attended Chicago Comic-Con. In 1993, still living with my parents, my mother gave me a lift to and from the show. Neil Gaiman was the Guest of Honor that year, and programming included a midnight reading and free copies of Sandman #50. It was the first year in Ros
emont’s ginormous Convention Center, and I remember sitting on the marble floor reading comics, only to almost be run over by rock star Steven Tyler as he and his entourage swept past like a tornado, scattering fans in his wake.
In many ways, comic book conventions were industry trade shows that the fans were invited to attend. But back then, the show was still about comics. Panels were more than just a slide show of what books each publisher was bringing out that year. There were fantastic panel discussions, arguments, fireworks, and hilarity. There was a chance for fans to finally ask the questions interviewers never asked, and get answers from the top talent in the industry ten feet away on a dais.
It was magic.
When Chicago Comic-Con 1996 came around, I was back in Chicago and came by the Hyatt Regency on Thursday night to hang out in the sports bar, Knuckles. It became the hub of convention activity for a solid decade, and I became a dedicated Chicago Comic-Con barfly.
There were years where I never even purchased a membership to the show (or, more specifically, didn’t get a press badge for the show, as by then I was freelancing as a journalist). I would take off work early and go to the hotel to hang out with whoever was there. They were good years, full of great times, and friendships that began in Knuckles that would last a lifetime. But all that time – all those years of drinking until they kicked us out and then moving the party to the lobby or a friend’s room – I was aware that I was still considered a unicorn. I was still a girl who just happened to be “one of the guys.”
Then, around the turn of the millennium, I noticed something. I was no longer alone. I was starting to see the gender balance of the convention floor tip ever so slightly towards gender parity.
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Page 11
